


the sea has never been friendly to man

by Silvereye



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Angst, Canon-typical self harm by immortals, Emotional Whump tbh, M/M, Pining, Suicidal Thoughts, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:36:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29734692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvereye/pseuds/Silvereye
Summary: In which Sebastien Le Livre goes to war, discovers his immortality, meets other immortals, learns about the immortal under the sea and does his best to help. And falls in love, much to his chagrin.(roleswap AU - Joe is under the sea and Quynh is not)
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 42





	the sea has never been friendly to man

**Author's Note:**

> This is a little heavier than my average fic. More detailed warnings in the end note.
> 
> This fic would not be here without [hoarmurath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoarmurath/) who passionately capslocked at the initial idea, at every snippet I sent her and also while betaing the final draft (and then told me the pacing was wonky, which it was). Thank you. <>

The war does not _end_.

Sebastien has seen enough indignities recently, but this somehow offends him the most. Being caught for forgery was his own fault – he _had_ become sloppy these past few years, after his wife died. The choice between execution and army was fair, in its cold heartless way, and he frankly expected worse. The march north through France and Rhinelands and Prussia was no harder than it had to be, all things considered.

The Russian Empire is an awful land, so flat and featureless that a man could stand up and see into eternity, if he weren’t choked by all the forest. There are miserable hills attempting to pass for mountains, there are sullen villages trying to scratch out a livelihood, and crowding in from every side there are the trees no one has ever attempted to tame. The roads are either narrow paths through the thickets or, in the open, veritable mires during rain and furrows upon furrows of leg-breaking clay under the punishing sun. Their supply trains disintegrate in the face of all that. Sebastien can’t blame them.

The army presses on, through cities with names Sebastien can barely be bothered to pronounce: Vilna and Smolensk and whatever the hell else. They all burn the same. His fellow soldiers die, by bullet and bayonet and hunger and heat and sickness and suicide, all the unglorious ways a man can give up his soul. Sebastien is old enough to remember the Revolution and know that this will not make the generals turn around. A man will drown the world in blood if he thinks his goal noble enough, and their generals do.

He sticks with the army. The alternative is throw himself at the mercy of whatever is out there – and that is the forest and the peasants who would be all too keen to do unto him as the French have done unto them.

Sebastien breaks after Borodino. Torture and death at the hand of locals can’t be worse than _this_. He gets caught trying to slip away one morning when they break camp, a harried officer gives an order to hang him from the nearest convenient tree and that should be that.

#

The first time he really becomes conscious is at sunset, the sky above him as vast and bloody as the battlefield. Then he realizes he shouldn’t – shouldn’t see the sky above him, or at all. He sits up and claws at his throat. Nothing there, no rope and no welts.

A man stands a few feet away, leaning on a shovel, stricken. He has to be a local – no uniform, no boots, his arms more sunburnt and his face less haggard than that of a starving French soldier.

They stare at each other for what feels like a very long time. Sebastien wonders if the man will brain him with the shovel. Sebastien is a Frenchman, obviously worth executing and must look like a revenant besides.

The man runs. Sebastien tries to call out, but his throat is dry and hoarse and no sound comes out.

Much later, he will wonder if the man was a priest. The French army could not have been so far. Who else would have risked such danger to try to dig a grave for a hanged enemy?

#

Sebastien huddles in the root cellar of a burnt-down farm for a few weeks. It keeps the rain out, which is already better than nothing. There is nothing edible in the cellar, the French or the retreating Russians or the fleeing peasants having taken everything, but in the garden there are a few untrampled vegetables and an apple tree bearing acrid winter fruit. He starves, but not to death.

One day he cuts a long line across the back of his hand with the knife he found in the ruin of the main house. It might be hunger-madness or it might be morbid curiosity. The edges of the wound stitch themselves closed either way. After a few breaths there’s nothing but a ragged pink scar and then nothing at all except for the memory of hurt.

He has never been able to feel pain in his dreams, so this must be real. Not a fever dream his mind is conjuring while his body lies in a makeshift hospital near Smolensk, burning of either heatstroke or influenza.

Sebastien looks at the knife for a long time. The edge is still bright red with his blood, but it dulls to brown and then black in the falling twilight.

So. He really died. It wasn’t some misguided mercy or mere mistake by the soldiers who hanged him. He choked on that rope, he might have kept choking if a Samaritan hadn’t cut him down. This was not a dream.

He holds the knife to his neck. This – this would be proof, wouldn’t it? If he came back from this. It’s not like he has anything to lose. He’s a deserter in a hostile land, no one awaits him at home any more, the state of his soul has been suspect for decades now. If he dies, he dies. If he doesn’t...

Eventually night falls and he drifts off to sleep. His dreams are fragmentary. There’s a couple in a café somewhere, a severe-looking clean-shaven young man with dark hair drawn back and an Asian woman in a red dress smiling at her companion. There’s a man on a ship, standing watch at night. Then there’s cold and darkness and utter lack of air.

Sebastien wakes. For a moment his throat feels too tight to breathe. He scrambles out of the cellar.

It’s a clear unseasonably cold night. The moon has already sunk behind the forest and the forest itself is a swathe of featureless darkness ringing the horizon, but the stars above him are the brightest he has ever seen. Every exhalation fogs against the sky, every inhalation needles his throat, but this cold is not the cold of his dream and for that he is grateful. He stands there until the last stars dissolve in dawn and then he goes and starts a fire.

#

He makes it to Riga by May. It’s not an easy journey, on foot and alone, but here and there the people he meets take pity on him, haggard and mute-seeming as he is. A bowl of soup, a piece of bread, the oldest most-mended coat that the menfolk of the family can relinquish. Most people have no pity left to spare, but then the winter comes in early and lingers long and he, unlike everyone he meets, will come back to life after dying of it.

Sometime in the late winter he realizes he can understand something of the languages around him. There are many: Russian is a given in this empire but in the cities they often speak German and most peasants speak some third or fourth or fifth language altogether. He’s nowhere near fluent, but he catches the basics and that’s already an improvement.

A forger can find work everywhere. He knows his new contacts are amused by him, by the fact that he can write beautiful documents in German or Russian, as long as he’s given the necessary samples, yet speaks both poorly. They pay him. That’s enough.

He keeps having the same dreams. The mariner, usually somewhere on a vast angry sea. The Asian woman who likes red, and her companion who might actually be a woman as well and dress in men’s clothes for whatever reason she has. And then that last fragment he hates to dwell upon, even as it becomes more and more familiar. The cold, the darkness occasionally shading into curious blue twilight, and drowning. Always drowning.

#

He comes home one evening in late October and finds the two women waiting for him. The one that likes to wear red is examining his desk, all the inks and quills he has forgotten to put away. The one that dresses like a man is sitting on his bed with a cigar in one hand and a cup she’s using as an ashtray in the other, eyeing him the way a sheepdog might look at a recalcitrant sheep.

“Hello,” the one in red says in Provençal. Sebastien hasn’t heard his native language for more than a year. Homesickness hits him like a horsekick.

“I’ve dreamed about you,” he answers.

“We know.” She steps closer. “You must have questions.”

“Yes,” he says. “Starting with, who are you and how did you get in?”

“We know how to pick locks and yours was not very difficult,” the one who dresses like a man says impatiently, also in Provençal. Her accent is more obvious, but no easier to place. “Let’s not waste time. You are immortal. So are we. We try to help people when we can. You have nothing keeping you here and you are starting to draw the wrong kind of attention. Pack your necessities. Let’s go.”

So the contact who said the police were starting to notice the discrepancies was not lying. The two women are – not friends, but dreaming of them means he knows a little of them, and at least he would not be alone. “Go where?” he asks.

“To Stavanger in Norway,” the impatient one says. “We have a friend there.”

“The mariner?”

The women exchange glances. For a moment, the one in red is not smiling and the other one looks like an old wound. Then it passes.

“Yes,” the one who likes red says. “I suppose you could call him that.”

“And what should I call you?” he asks, going to the desk and starting to gather his supplies.

“These days I’m Rosa,” the one in red says. “She’s Andreas.”

“I’m guessing they’re not your real names.”

She smiles a little smugly, like she knows a secret he does not. “No. I’m Quỳnh and she’s Andromache. But those don’t blend in here very well.”

He nods. “I’m – I was Sebastien le Livre. They usually call me the bookmaker around here.” He knows just enough of German to be aware that _Bücherschreiber_ could have other meanings if you stretched it enough – a clerk, a writer. It feels a little like a joke, but one he could smile at.

“It’s very nice to finally meet you, Sebastien le Livre,” Quỳnh says.

#

Being immortal does not make one immune to seasickness. Sebastien is miserable all the way to Copenhagen. He spends a lot of time sitting on deck, staring at the horizon and trying to settle his stomach. It seems like it would be more prudent to simply tie himself to the railing and vomit his innards out, if that’s how it must be, but both Quỳnh and Andreas get oddly tense the one time he tries it, and thus he does not try again.

Sebastien envies the third – fourth? – immortal, the mariner. _He_ certainly does not get seasick. Dreaming of him is an strange consolation in those worst nights when the wind seems intent on tearing the ship off its anchor, Andreas and Quỳnh whisper in their hammocks, unaffected, and all Sebastien can do is to hold on to his and wait for morning.

But there’s always the last part of the dreams and by now he’s very afraid of what it means.

The journey from Copenhagen to Norway is worse. There are few merchant vessels, given the recent war, and those few are not too keen on sailing out in November. Andreas bribes one intrepid captain. Sebastien gives up all hope of eating, because wind off the North Sea is worse than that on the Baltic. He cannot give up sleeping, however, and so the dreams continue.

Quỳnh finds him one early morning when he’s sitting on deck, hoping to see anything but the gray upon gray of sea and predawn sky. She sits down by him and for a while they stare at the horizon together.

“There is a fifth of us, isn’t there?” he asks.

Quỳnh glances at him, then looks away. “Yes,” she says softly.

“Who – what happened to him?”

“His name is Yusuf. We... were sailing from Stavanger to Aberdeen. There was a storm. He was swept overboard.” She pauses. Before Sebastien can ask anything else she continues: “We don’t know where it happened exactly. We were off course already, it was night and the storm didn’t calm until the next evening.”

The first time Sebastien saw a map as a child he was unsettled by it. Sea was crowding the dry land from most sides and compared to the tangle of names and rivers and cities on land the sea was so terribly empty. As if there was nothing there.

And there isn’t. He’s old enough, has seen enough to know that there really is nothing but saltwater and too-wide sky and _drowning_.

“How long has it been?” he asks.

“Forty years.”

Sebastien cannot wrap his head around it. He knows that Quỳnh and Andreas and the mariner must be older than him, might be very old. He hasn’t asked. But forty years is both shockingly, banally familiar – almost exactly the length of his life so far – and utterly incomprehensible when he tries to append _spent drowning_ to it.

“God,” he whispers.

Quỳnh huffs, a sound between a sigh and a breath of mirthless laughter. “Not a merciful one, then.”

Sebastien cannot argue with that.

“You dream of him, don’t you?” Quỳnh asks.

“Yes.”

Quỳnh is silent for a long while. By the time she speaks there is light smeared over the eastern horizon, pale gold without warmth or cheer. “We all love Yusuf. But the one you called mariner – he loves Yusuf the most. Try to not tell him too much about the dreams.”

#

They make it to Stavanger by Christmas. The journey overland is the exact opposite of Sebastian’s wandering through Russia. Norway seems to consist mostly of mountains, fjords and habitable slopes between the two. He does not die once. He has companions. They’re better than him at both riding and talking to the locals, but on a rather memorable evening he forges a letter of recommendation to solve a misunderstanding and that is apparently a skill neither of them possesses.

Andreas leads them to a small white house overlooking the Stavanger harbor. The mariner opens the door before Andreas has time to knock twice. He’s both familiar and not: Sebastien has dreamed the striking Roman nose and the set of his shoulders, but not the shadows under his pale eyes or the fact he looks scarcely older than thirty, even if he must be much older than Sebastien.

He shakes hands with Andreas and Quỳnh and then he’s saying: “I’m Nicolò,” holding out his hand to Sebastien. His handshake is almost exactly what Sebastien expected: strong and warm. “Niklas around here.”

“Sebastien le Livre. Nothing else so far.” He’s starting to wonder if he _should_ try on a different name, since the rest of them do and probably for good reason. It might be prudent to get used to changing his identity and blending in wherever he is.

Nicolò – does not smile exactly, but there’s a ghost of it around his eyes. “Pleased to meet you.”

He ushers them into his kitchen. Sebastien can already tell that no one else lives in this house: it’s neat but too sparse. _Could use a woman’s touch_ , his wife would have once said, and he smiles at the memory. Andreas and Quỳnh are unlikely to provide that kind of touch.

Andreas has apparently only been waiting until they’re out of the street to hug Nicolò. Quỳnh does the same. From his vantage point Sebastien can see their faces when they hug their friend and there’s something a little like fear or relief in them.

Then it passes. Nicolò heats water for tea and slices bread. Quỳnh makes conversation, a stream of observations about the recent war and how it must have interfered with fishing – so Nicolò is a fisherman, not serving on a warship? They speak Provençal, presumably for Sebastien’s benefit, since it isn’t Quỳnh’s native tongue and neither is it Nicolò’s, going by his name. Sebastien cannot sure, though. Nicolò’s pronunciation is old-fashioned but otherwise more familiar than Andreas or Quỳnh’s.

“Stop looking at me like this, Anne,” Nicolò says before turning around and placing the teapot on the table. “I’m fine. I did promise.”

“That you did,” she says.

“Tell me about Russia, then. Still cold?”

“Only in winter.”

#

There’s only one bedroom in Nicolò’s house and in the late evening it’s quickly relinquished to Andreas and Quỳnh. Sebastien is herded – there isn’t a better word for it – to the sofa in Nicolò’s little-used living room.

“Where will you sleep?” he protests.

“On the kitchen sofa. It’s fine.” A note of amusement dances in his eyes. “It’s more distant from the bedroom. You are doing _me_ a favor.”

Sebastien thinks the kitchen sofa is narrower and considerably harder, but he was not raised to argue with his hosts. He nods.

He learns very rapidly what Nicolò meant about the favor. The bedroom is directly above the living room. Sebastien can tell Andreas and Quỳnh are polite enough to try to be quiet, but the night is quieter still. He has been aware Andreas and Quỳnh are close for weeks now, but he wasn’t so aware of what _kind_ of close.

The room is warm, however, and the sheets smell pleasantly of some herb kept in the laundry chest. He drifts off to sleep. He dreams.

The cold lightless drowning has become strangely familiar by now. The dream seems longer, as if his mind can concentrate on Yusuf now that he has met everyone else. Waking is easier, since his body learns in only a breath or two that he can indeed breathe. And the fragments are clearer.

He sits up on the sofa, elbows on his knees, and stares into the dark.

Yusuf is trying to – swim, or walk, or whatever unholy combination of both is possible so deep under the sea. He’s not quick, since he has so little time between waking and drowning again, but he is moving.

Sebastien wonders briefly why Yusuf would not simply try to swim for the surface – but then the sea is deep and swimming upwards must be a different beast from diving down. Presumably, if Sebastien can think of it, Yusuf has tried it and failed at it.

To walk through a sea. Oh, God.

Later, when Sebastien has lain down and half-drifted to sleep again, he hears the quiet creak of the floorboards behind his door. He forgets it by morning.

#

Nicolò never asks.

He must know Sebastien is dreaming of Yusuf, and Sebastien knows Nicolò knows, but neither of them starts the conversation and so it remains hanging over them, unspoken but not unnoticeable, much like the sword of Damocles.

They stay in Stavanger for the darkest part of the winter. After that, Andreas’ increasing antsiness propels them across the continent, to try to help an uprising in the outskirts of the Ottoman Empire, and then across the Atlantic to South America. Sebastien grows no fonder of the sea, but at least he learns how to stop vomiting.

He learns more of his companions, too. Andreas is often impatient and brusque, but she’s a surprisingly good teacher. Quỳnh is both a very good diplomat and able to tell such filthy stories with a straight face that even Nicolò cracks a smile. And Nicolò…

Nicolò talks little, smiles less, never laughs. He has a good memory and he _will_ remember every passing remark about someone missing a favorite food. He likes to read, same as Sebastien, but Nicolò’s taste tends towards the sciences and philosophy, not novels and plays. Neither of them can be too picky, however, as Andreas does not have many safehouses on this continent and books in rucksacks are surprisingly heavy.

Nicolò has occasional bouts of insomnia, like Sebastien does. On the nights sleep eludes both of them they sit up together, playing draughts or chess or one of the many, many card games Nicolò knows. When Sebastien is the only one awake he divides his time between staring at the bright constellations utterly dissimilar to those he saw in Russia and, more prosaically, tending to the fire.

One night when they are camping in the Andes and hoping to meet up with the rebel army before they can get _too_ lost, Sebastien wakes from now-too-familiar drowning dream. He blinks, looks at their tiny fire, then at Nicolò, who is sitting on a rock and observing him.

“You dream of him,” Nicolò says softly.

Sebastien nods.

“He’s still fighting, then,” Nicolò says.

A chill goes through Sebastien. There’s satisfaction in Nicolò’s voice, and sorrow, but there is also the kind of unyielding faith he’s only ever heard from martyrs going to the guillotine.

#

They return to Europe and spend a few weeks in Lisbon, doing nothing more onerous than planning their next destination. André wants to go to Greece, which is apparently fighting for its independence from the Ottomans. Neither Quỳnh nor Sebastien has any objections.

Nicolò only says: “I’ll go north again.”

“Not Stavanger?” André asks.

“Peterhead.”

She nods. “We’ll send the letters to the post office, then.”

The farewell feels like a practiced thing, as if they’ve done this so many times it has become habitual. André and Quỳnh may have, for all Sebastien knows. Sebastien simply looks at Nicolò’s ship fading into the western horizon, and then he asks Quỳnh and André: “Is he… really trying to find him that way?”

“Yes,” Quỳnh says softly.

 _And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men._ Sebastien has to grit his teeth against hysterical laughter. What a joke God has made of them.

“You alright?” André asks.

Sebastien nods. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

#

“What is he like?” he asks one evening when they’re sitting around campfire somewhere in Aetolia. It’s late. For the last hour they have been solving a bottle of wine Andreas bartered off an olive farmer.

“Who?” Andreas asks.

“Yusuf.” Sebastien wonders if he’s going to have to explain: that he would like to know anything else about this man he dreams of in addition to _drowning_ and _has not gone mad yet somehow_.

There’s a long pause and then Quỳnh says, slowly: “We were happier when he was around. We hadn’t lost him yet, of course, but also because he was the most good-natured out of all of us. Not even always funny like Andromache –“

“I am not funny,” Andreas says, but she’s smiling.

“You are, love. But Yusuf was like sunlight after one of these gray northern winters.”

Sebastien frowns at that past tense: _Yusuf was_ and not _Yusuf is_. Then again, it might be both uncharitable and very naive of him. How many times can a man drown before he stops being good-natured?

“He did have a temper,” Andreas says. “Not all the time. Usually when some poor fool thought killing Nico was a wise thing to do.”

“That’s not surprising, Nico was exactly the same.” Quỳnh looks at Andreas and her smile says: _and aren’t we?_

“They killed each other during the, what are they calling it now, the Second Crusade –“

“The First,” Quỳnh corrects and grimaces a little, as if the entire topic is distasteful. “It was the First. Jerusalem in 1099.”

“–yes, the First, and after that they somehow came to the conclusion that no one else should ever try.” Andreas grins. “We are in a terrible line of work for that to be feasible.”

“We are. It’s – Yusuf wasn’t actually a soldier before he first died. Me and Andromache were, Nico was raised to be a knight for all that he tried to become a priest for a while –“

“Didn’t take.”

“No, it didn’t. He believes in his god the same way I believe in sun rising every morning, but from what he’s told us he didn’t make a very good priest. But Yusuf, his family were traders and he was a poet in addition. He could have lived his entire life in peace if he had wanted to.”

“But he decided to stay in Jerusalem and fight the Franks. Failed to kill one...”

“Fell in love with him.”

“Love from first stabbing?” Andreas raises her hand to block Quỳnh when she mock-swats her, catches Quỳnh’s hand and kisses her palm. “Alright, maybe not that early. But they had it figured out by the time we found them.”

Quỳnh kisses her back. They lose the trail of conversation. Sebastien looks studiously at the sky.

He has suspected Nicolò is in love with Yusuf ever since that night in the Andes. Maybe since he first realized that there was a fifth immortal under the sea and a mariner _on_ the sea. Love would explain that terrifying single-minded devotion. Still, it’s chilling to have the confirmation, because it means that Nicolò’s love – the love of his entire immortal life, if Sebastien is interpreting it right – has been drowning for half a century.

#

Quỳnh and Andreas decide to go back to America. Sebastien considers going with them, but in the end something draws him to Scotland. He does not know what exactly. Scotland is not at war or in revolt and Sebastien isn’t a sailor, so he can’t precisely join Nicolò – Nicholas here, probably – in his endless combing of the North Sea. Maybe it’s really a kind of curiosity. He has never been to Britain before.

England is both gray and chilly after Greece. Scotland is, if anything, grayer and chillier. But Sebastien has enough money and passable enough English to make it to Peterhead without trouble.

Nicholas, however, is not in Peterhead. No one seems to be sure where he has gone.

Sebastien manages to exit the post office gracefully and start fretting after he’s locked the door of his inn room behind him. The world is suddenly vast and terrifying again, the way it has not been in almost two decades. André and Quỳnh are on another continent, Nicolò is missing and Sebastien does not know what he’s supposed to do in a situation like this.

Has someone started suspecting Nicolò? If he has haunted various ports around the North Sea long enough then a lucky observer might have realized he has not aged a day. Possible, terrifying, unlikely. Nicolò may be reckless, but a fool he is not.

Has he tried to kill himself? He would be unable to, but Sebastien knows how illogical despair can be. Again, possible, and terrifying, but very unlikely.

It seems most probable, then, that he is gone on some mysterious errand and will eventually return, since he does need the Peterhead post office to contact the rest of them. In this case, the most reasonable course of action would be to wait until he’s back.

Sebastien waits for three terrifying weeks. On the fourth Friday of his stay he’s eating lunch and composing a letter to André in his head when Nicolò sits by him.

“Old friend, what are you doing here?” he says, uncharacteristically warm, to the great interest of the serving girl bringing them tea. “I thought you would come in September, no earlier.”

“You know how it is,” Sebastien says, playing along. “My sister and her husband decided to take a, ahem, longer detour and I figured I might as well come see you instead of tailing them. Now, how have you been?” He can already tell the answer cannot be fine. Nicolò seems _tired_. The shadows under his eyes look almost like bruises.

“I’m fine,” Nicolò says.

“Would you mind terribly if I stayed with you?” Sebastien says. He manages a grimace that’s hopefully the right shade of self-deprecating. “Thrift is a virtue and so forth.”

Nicolò draws a breath. Then: “No, of course not. We can go after you finish here.”

#

Nicolò’s current home is almost two miles out of town, wind-bleached and lonely at the top of a hill sloping into the sea. Its interior is much like his house in Stavanger: orderly and sparse, the whisper of the waves insistently audible at the edge of hearing.

Sebastien talks about Greece. Nicolò listens in attentive silence, the ghost-smile lingering around his eyes when Sebastien alludes to André and Quỳnh being… the way they are, which is both heartwarming and occasionally a little insufferable.

“Are you still fishing?” Sebastien asks and tries to make it mean: how _are_ you really?

Again that half-breath of hesitation, then: “No, not that. But I am searching.”

Sebastien nods and does not ask for more.

The evening passes mostly in that easy silence he has started to associate with Nicolò. Sebastien hauls firewood from the shed behind the house, Nicolò cooks, Sebastien washes the dishes. They play a desultory match of draughts, which Sebastien almost wins. Nicolò settles under the living room window with a book – Goethe, in German, as far as Sebastien can tell – to catch what remains of the evening sun. Sebastien notes with some amusement this seems to be the only seat in the living room that does see occasional use. He has become too restless to look through Nicolò’s bookshelf, however.

“I’ll go for a walk,” he says.

“Do you want company?”

He shakes his head. “I’ll be fine.”

The land here is flat and windswept, a little like what he remembers of Russia, except that the trees are not so numerous and most of them have grown aslant, away from the sea. If it were raining it would probably be downright oppressive, but the only clouds are thin white feathers across the sky. It is windy. He finds he does not mind.

He walks until he encounters a river, follows it to the sea, then starts up the coast again intending to end at Nicolò’s home. What he finds instead is a shack at the shoreline, right where grass yields to sand. There is no pier near it, no boat dragged ashore, but the shack looks in good order and seems near enough to Nicolò’s house that it probably is his.

Sebastien peeks through the window, startles, takes a minute to catch his breath. Then he glances towards where Nicolò’s house must lie behind the trees. No movement.

He picks the lock.

A diving dress lying on the floor looks a lot less like a corpse at second glance. Sebastien crouches by it, runs his hand across the heavy waterproof canvas, the smooth brass helmet, the compass fastened to one wrist. He has seen things like this before. Supposedly they can be used for underwater salvage. Half of London is spellbound by the progress of divers working to bring up cannons from a sunken ship.

But the diver’s dresses in London newspapers had a hose for air and this one does not.

Nicolò puts the book down when Sebastien comes back, looks up at him with that ghost-smile. It fades when he sees Sebastien’s face. For a few heartbeats neither of them moves.

“Is that what you meant by searching for him?” Sebastien finally asks and manages not to scream. “That thing with no air line.”

Nicolò does not flinch. “Yes,” he says.

“You – you must run out of air before you get very far from the shore.”

“Yes,” Nicolò says again with that perfect calm.

“I thought you promised Andromache you would not...” he trails off. He has only heard the sparsest retelling of that promise, from very drunk Quỳnh near Athens, but it suffices to see the loophole.

“I promised Andromache I would not drown myself searching for Yusuf,” Nicolò says softly. “And I have not drowned once.” He observes Sebastien’s appalled silence for what feels like a very long time. Then he stands up, takes a map from the shelf and unfolds it on the table. “Come here.”

Nicolò smooths the map with his fingertips. Sebastien notes, distantly, that it seems to be printed on good paper by a decent craftsman. A detailed nautical chart, because the sea is full of depth lines, not a flat emptiness occasionally bisected by a meridian.

“Stavanger is here,” Nicolò says. “And here, Aberdeen. It should not have been a long journey. We were caught by a storm somewhere _here_ , I think. We did not land in Denmark afterwards, even though the ship was damaged. This means we could not have been blown much past _this_ area. But this is all I know. No one had time to ascertain coordinates in that storm.

If you still dream of Yusuf then he’s alive. If he’s alive he’s trying to save himself.”

“He is,” Sebastien whispers.

Nicolò nods. “What I fear is _this_ and _this_.” He draws lines on the map with his fingers. Sebastien sees them like mirages: a vast underwater valley hugging the entire western and southern coast of Norway and a mess of uneven seabed perhaps a hundred miles east of Scotland, deeper than its flat surroundings.

“If he moves southwards he will eventually reach land,” Nicolò says. “But everyone walks downhill if they don’t think of it. If he happens upon either of _these_ he may go north.”

Where there is nothing but a few rocky islands and then open ocean.

“If he had died his final death,” Nicolò says almost inaudibly, “I would stop and I would grieve. But you dream of him and so, Mother of God aid me, there is nothing else I can do. Do you understand?”

“Is this the only way?” Sebastien asks and does not try to hide the desperation in his voice. “If there are these diving dresses, aren’t there, I don’t know, underwater boats –”

“There are,” Nicolò says. “I can go deeper than they can.”

How do you keep from getting lost, Sebastien wants to ask, but he can answer that himself. Using the compass to keep to one direction. Counting deaths if necessary.

Nicolò is looking up at him, still hunched over the map, his hands on Denmark and the English Midlands. Sebastien knows him well enough to recognize the steel in his gaze. He cannot be talked around.

So Sebastien steps closer and hugs him instead. Nicolò goes rigid with surprise, then relaxes by degrees, until almost all the tension is gone from his shoulders.

#

“Will you tell Andromache and Quỳnh?” Nicolò asks the next morning.

Sebastien sighs. He hasn’t slept well – did not sleep at all, if he’s honest. The night is still short at this latitude and time of year. He spent most of it sitting in Nicolò’s window seat, staring into the dark.

“I will not,” he says. “It shouldn’t be me.”

“If I tell them they will ask me to stop. You know it.”

Sebastien nods. They’ve both heard Andromache and Quỳnh’s story about the immortal who stopped healing. If Andromache and Quỳnh find out that Nicolò is killing himself this often they will try to intervene. They might be entirely justified.

Nicolò looks at him, evidently prepared to wait as long as he must to get an answer. The only things Sebastien can hear are the distant whisper of the sea, the murmur of fire in the stove and the occasional breath of wind outside. This quiet is nonetheless nothing like Nicolò’s usual easy silence, and a lot more like the heaviness of those last moments before a storm breaks.

Sebastien stares into his cup. A tisane, mint and lemon balm. Nicolò drinks alcohol without compunctions, but Sebastien has never seen him take coffee or true tea, only various tisanes. He hasn’t dared to ask. The answer might be that Yusuf likes both tea and coffee and Sebastien is not sure he’s brave enough to hear it.

“I think,” he says, before he can decide he’s not brave enough for that either, “that you’re doing it wrong.”

Nicolò raises an eyebrow.

“You didn’t manage to fish him out,” Sebastien says and knows he’s diving straight into the terrible clarity of the obsession that grips Nicolò, and God help Sebastian because he might not ever surface. “You are not going to stumble upon him by walking the seabed because the sea is vast and you don’t know where he is.”

“Do you have recommendations?” Nicolò asks, his voice arctic.

“I’ve seen light,” Sebastien says. “Blue, very dim. Back when I first started dreaming of him, then not for a long time, then again this winter. The seabed seems like mud, definitely not rocky and probably not sandy, but I don’t remember how it felt like at first. I think he’s trying to keep to a straight line, but he can’t measure it and neither can I. Does this help you?”

Nicky is quiet for a long while. Then: “Have you ever noticed... landmarks, I suppose? Trenches, holes?”

Sebastien shakes his head. “It’s very flat.”

More time passes. Nicolò is staring into the distance, motionless, and Sebastien is smart enough to drink tisane and not interrupt him.

“I’m going to London,” Nicolò finally says. “The Hydrographic Office must have newer charts than mine. Do you want to come?”

#

The problem with diving after Nicolò is that Sebastien is surprisingly unaccustomed to drowning after all.

They return from London with a bounty of maps. Sebastien narrates every single thing he can recall from his dreams, then Nicolò teases out more with precise questions, occasionally Sebastien dreams more. He tries to capture the exact hue of the light in his dreams with paper and ink and aquarelles. It does not work, but not for lack of trying.

He thought he was used to the dreams of drowning, but now that he’s paying such strict attention to them it takes him more and more breaths after waking to remember that he _can_ breathe. The alternative is worse, however, and so he endures and does not tell Nicolò about it.

One night in early October he almost rolls off Nicolò’s living room sofa after a dream. He manages to catch himself, to sit up and force himself to breathe until his treacherous lungs recall what air is. He’s not so lost that he would miss the quiet creak of the floorboards.

“Are you there?” Sebastien asks.

“Yes,” Nicolò says. Sebastien cannot see him in the dark, but he can hear Nicolò enter the room, go on one knee, take one of Sebastien’s hands unerringly in his. For a moment Nicolò’s hands seem feverishly hot, but really it is only that Sebastien’s are cold.

“Come upstairs,” Nicolò says. “You should not be alone.”

Sebastien does not object.

It is far from the first time he shares a bedroom or a bed with Nicolò. These things are luxuries in most places where they’ve been with Quỳnh and André, and even when there are separate bedrooms they often don’t bother. Nicolò’s houses in Stavanger and Peterhead are some of the rare exceptions to the rule. Even here, the bed is wide enough that they both fit easily. Nicolò takes the side nearer to the door, starts to lie down facing the door as he always does in every bed, catches himself.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, turning to Sebastien.

“Not really,” Sebastien says.

“Alright.” Then, after a silence: “Thank you. For what you’re doing.”

“I couldn’t do anything else,” Sebastien says and does not know whether it is a lie. Strictly speaking, he _could_ go to André and Quỳnh in Brazil and let the drowning dreams settle back into a habitual background terror. But he might not be able to bear it at this point.

“Still,” Nicolò says, as if he can hear Sebastien’s thoughts.

Sebastien doesn’t say anything else. Nicolò drifts off to sleep, but Sebastien is unable to. He lies there, listening to Nicolò’s breathing, steady as the sea. Eventually the clouds part enough to let some of the light of the waning moon through and Nicolò’s face becomes visible. He does not wake.

 _I’m in love_ , Sebastien thinks with the same clarity he usually feels when assessing a mortal wound.

He has been mostly immune to it. It has been no great loss: before his wife he did not know he missed much, after her death he knew precisely how much he could lose. Given what he is now it would be impossible to build something with a mortal and immortals are not an option. Not being in love isn’t a lack in these circumstances, it is a mercy, and now he’s lost even that.

What a fool God has made of him.

#

Autumn shades into winter, which is long and impossibly even grayer at this latitude. Sebastien is starting to grow restless, but he does not know what it is he wants to do. Go to South America and meet up with Quỳnh and André who seem to be enjoying Brazil, presumably. Maybe go and try to help anywhere in Europe that is still dreaming of revolution the way half of the continent has done since summer.

He is not certain what help is, though. Everything felt simple and clear when Sebastien was nineteen, and yet all Revolution won in the end was an emperor for France and death for himself. He’s past sixty now, in the blunt reckoning of years that his body refuses to acknowledge. France is still ruled by a king. What kind of progress is this?

There’s not much new information in his dreams at this point. Nicolò already has every single detail that could be wrung of him, and is performing some strange nautical alchemy of numbers and charts and hope on them. Sebastien knows when something is almost entirely out of his grasp, so he does the uncomplicated work instead. Someone has to fetch water and keep the stove warm, after all.

They continue to sleep in the same bed, as much as either of them still sleeps. Nicolò stays up late or rises early, running on determination and tisane. Sebastien keeps more regular hours, but sleep has started to consistently elude him in the lonely predawn hours. It sometimes feels as if he spends half of every night awake, listening to Nicolò’s breathing or, when Nicolò is not abed, the incessant sigh of the sea.

In February the newspapers mention a Dutch lieutenant who was told to raise the Belgian flag and decided blowing his ship up was an acceptable alternative. For a long while Sebastien does not know whether he approves of the man’s conviction or finds the thoughtless martyrdom appalling: the lieutenant might have been ready to die, but was everyone else on the ship?

Heroics are so much simpler in poetry.

In March Sebastien comes back from a long aimless wander around the beach to find Nicolò methodically drinking himself senseless.

He’s sitting in the living room, his charts and notes spread over the table. The bottle of akvavit that was previously sitting in the kitchen cabinet is less than half full. His hand does not shake when he pours another glass, but Sebastien knows that does not signify at all. Nicolò could be unable to walk three steps in a straight line, minutes away from falling asleep, but his hands would still be steady.

Sebastien gets a chair.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.

“Fladen Ground,” Nicolò says. He draws one of the charts nearer, jabs at it with his free hand. It might be the same map he unfolded all those months ago. “I cannot think of any other place where he could be.”

Sebastien can read the chart well enough to see the problem. Fladen Ground is very flat and very vast, north and west of the area where Nicolò thought Yusuf might have been lost. A smaller area than the entire North Sea, but still hardly searchable by one man, or two, no matter how determined.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

Nicolò nods.

“What are you going to do?” He tries to not think about the diving dress, unused for half a year.

“I don’t know. Ask me tomorrow.” He empties the glass, but does not object when Sebastien takes it from his hand. Sebastien refills it, drinks himself. There’s not much else he can do but to keep Nicolò company.

They finish the bottle. Nicolò stares into the sunset, but it’s obvious he does not really see it.

“Why hasn’t he tried to swim out?” Sebastien finally asks and notes distantly that the akvavit really has to kick in fast and hard if he’s mad enough to ask it. “He knows how to swim. When he can see light he knows which way surface is.”

Nicolò shakes his head. “That’s not enough. He’s more than fifty fathoms under the sea and has only one lungful of air. A good swimmer might make it, but he and I were only ever passable.” He turns the glass around in his hands. “At a certain depth you stop floating towards the surface and start sinking instead. He’s much deeper than that.”

“I’m sorry,” Sebastien says.

“I know.” Nicolò tips his head back, looks at the ceiling. “It gets harder to reason the deeper you go. As if you’re drunk on – the depth of the sea, I suppose. He might not be able to think of swimming up any more.”

Neither of them says anything. The sun sets, painting the room rusty, then the dull gray of shadows and nothing at all in the end.

#

“You’re going to have to sleep eventually,” Sebastien says at some point long after the sunset. “Let’s go to bed.”

“Let’s,” Nicolò agrees. He rises to his feet. Sebastien listens for the smallest sign that Nicolò might be unsteady on his feet, but there are none. He’s still taken unaware when Nicolò catches one of Sebastien’s hands with the familiar eerie accuracy, steps closer and kisses him. It’s neither gentle nor passionate, only certain.

Breath catches in Sebastien’s throat. For a moment he’s frozen solid, his heart beating a mad erratic rhythm like that of the wings of a caught bird _– are you – is this – you can’t we can’t oh God I want_. He yields, parts his lips and kisses back. It takes all his restraint to not go further than Nicolò has. Sebastien wants to melt against him and _plead_.

“Do you – “ he manages to say. “Tomorrow, won’t you regret –“

“I want to forget,” Nicolò says, and his voice almost does not shake, “for one damned night that it hurts. I’ve asked too much already. I’m still greedy enough to ask for this. Can you...”

“Yes,” Sebastien says. “Yes, of course.”

Nicolò leads them to the bedroom and then to bed, unerring even though the sky outside is thickly clouded and neither of them bothered to light a lamp before the sun set. Sebastien follows less gracefully, fumbles with Nicolò’s buttons in the dark and laughs at himself. Nicolò kisses him again and this time it is passionate, desperate and perfect.

The kiss must be even stronger than the akvavit. Time fractures and later Sebastien will only remember fragments of what comes after, bright like shards of a stained-glass window:

– Nicolò kneels in front of him, hands on his hips and Sebastien does not know what he has ever done to deserve this. He manages to gasp out a warning, which Nicolò either does not hear or elects to ignore and really, it’s either luck or providence that they’re so close to the edge of the bed, because his knees buckle after. He sits down. Nicolò shuffles closer, still on his knees, and tilts Sebastien’s face with both hands into a kiss. It’s a little obscene. Sebastien does not want it to end –

– he pulls Nicolò down on the bed, kneels above him and kisses him again. Nicolò makes a little sound of amusement that turns into a more urgent sigh that turns into a moan so low it’s almost soundless. No one has ever accused Sebastien of being a slow study –

– he wakes from half-sleep to Nicolò tracing lines on his arm with feather-light fingers. It’s still too dark to see Nicolò’s face. Sebastien finds it by touch, kisses Nicolò again, not lightly at all, and when Nicolò answers with same he grinds against him –

– and finally, the moment where night is starting to turn into gray predawn shadows. Nicolò’s heartbeat under Sebastien’s hand is steady and peaceful, his breathing slow as the sea. Sebastien is almost asleep himself. He knows, distantly and calmly, that he never wants to wake again, because nothing will ever surpass this moment.

#

Sebastien expects to see regret or maybe anger when they wake in the morning. (Hopes for _more_ , in that treacherous lump of muscle that only knows what it wants and damn the rest of the world.) There is neither.

When Sebastien wakes, Nicolò is sitting up against the headboard and looking down at him with the same patient fond look of a stone angel he always gets when watching someone else sleep. He brushes hair away from Sebastien’s forehead and the cast of his face softens into the ghostly almost-smile Sebastien has come to love.

Sebastien closes his eyes again. He could brace for regret or anger, but he has no defense at all against gentleness. “So,” he says, voice rusty with morning.

“Thank you,” Nicolò says very quietly.

There’s no regret in his voice. Only the habitual kindness, an unusual degree of warmth and _why_ can’t these be enough for Sebastien? Why must he want something that was never his to want?

If Nicolò was a true widower, same as Sebastien himself, it would feel less like taking advantage. Most people move on. But Yusuf is still alive under the sea and that means Nicolò is both bereft and not. He’s as alone as anyone would be in this situation and yet has the hair-thin hope of reuniting with his – _husband_ , then, even if no church would agree. He cannot really heal, because the moment of Yusuf’s death never recedes the way it would for all mortals, and Sebastien already knows Nicolò is not likely to forget.

“Yeah,” Sebastien says and trusts the morning hoarseness to hide everything he needs hidden. “You’re welcome.”

But Nicolò is not done with him.

“I think I’ll stop,” he says. His voice is still barely louder than a whisper and so it takes Sebastien a moment to realize how utterly _dead_ it is. “You asked me what I was going to do. I can’t fish him out. I am not going to stumble upon him. There’s _nothing_ I can do except hope he walks out and so far – “ his voice splinters into a choked-off gasp.

“I’m sorry,” Sebastien says, scrambling into an upright position. “Oh God, I’m so sorry, I never should have – I’m sorry.” He tries to gather Nicolò in his arms. Nicolò rests his head against Sebastien’s shoulder and holds on as if drowning. His breath is beyond ragged, but Sebastien would feel tears on his bare skin. There are none. Nicolò either can’t or won’t cry and Sebastien is not certain which is worse.

“You never should have?” Nicolò repeats when he can breathe again.

“I never should have told you that you were doing it wrong,” Sebastien says. “I took hope away from you and nothing else.”

“You tried to help,” Nicolò says. “You _have_. More than I should have asked.”

“You think you should have handled all of this alone?” Sebastien asks, because otherwise he might say _you could ask for anything and I would be glad_.

“Yes,” Nicolò says, simply. “That is what I did, after Andromache and Quỳnh gave up. They – you must not blame them. We spent a long time trying to figure out where it happened, and we failed. Then we simply searched every bank in the area and also failed. I thought to go out with a fishing fleet. They came with me, the first three years, but we had ill luck with the captains we served under. Eventually they left to go help in a war, I forget which. May have been one of your revolutionary ones. I remained.”

It’s the most he has ever said about how Yusuf was lost, and Sebastien can still sense the vast absences in the story. He hesitates, then asks: “What did you do, that she made you promise not to drown yourself?”

Nicolò exhales. “I think it’s obvious.”

“On purpose?”

“On accident. But it was soon after we lost him, and I wasn’t sane. It must have looked like it was on purpose, or as if I didn’t care to avoid it.”

Sebastien hums. “They may have seen something you...” He falters, then goes on: “When my wife died I thought I could endure it. I dealt with her possessions – we didn’t have children, but she had sisters and much of what she left behind was of use to them and not me. I learned to cook for myself. Kept working, so I did not lose our home. It seemed like I was surviving. But looking back, I was nothing like alright at all.”

“Did you ever try to...” Nicolò’s voice is so matter-of-fact it takes Sebastien a heartbeat to realize what he’s asking.

“No,” he says. “Thought about it, once or twice, but never tried. I could not stare death in the face like that. It takes a certain bravery. I have none.”

“Doubtful,” Nicolò says. Sebastien smiles into his hair, at the relentless faith of that one word, but does not answer.

“I’m not going to make you promise anything,” Sebastien finally says. “But consider coming to me, if you start thinking about – you know. If you want to forget. You have not asked too much of me.”

Nicolò nods against his shoulder. It feels like it might be enough.

#

They go to Poland soon after, and are of as much help as any two foreigners can be in the twilight of that desperate war, which is not much at all.

Sebastien’s haphazard knowledge of field medicine ends up being the most significant of his skills. He can make a difference to those men – and a few women – whose wounds he cleans and stitches and binds, even if he can do nothing about the course of the war itself. No skill in his arsenal makes him suited to turn an entire battle. Nicolò probably couldn’t either, and so they spend the months trying to perform the little miracles.

Nicolò falls back into the previous rhythm of their friendship. It seems preternaturally easy for him, as if that one night and the morning after never really happened, as if he’s immovable like a saint or a pole star. Sebastien worries either way. There’s a despair in Nicolò, a relentless unmerciful terror well-veiled by his constancy and quietness.

Sebastien should not make himself yet another burden Nicolò would have to carry. He ignores the little voice that asks whether he would be a burden if he could after all offer himself like a bottle of laudanum.

The memories of that night dog Sebastien’s dreams either way. He feels guilty waking from them. He does not prefer the alternatives, however, since those are the drowning dreams or quotidian nightmares of death – his own, his wife’s, Nicolò’s, the people here and everywhere they’ve been the last two decades – and so he keeps dreaming of taking Nicolò to bed.

The uprising fails. Sebastien forges documents for those of their brothers-in-arms who will need them to get out or go to ground. It takes him less time than he expects it to, but then most people can get by without his forgeries. They spend another year trying to help, and the difference they make gets smaller and smaller, since there are only so many people they can get away from the vengeful gaze of the victors.

This is how they end up hiding in an abandoned shepherd’s hut in the Carpathian Mountains in September. The fact that it could be even later in the year is not much of a consolation.

“Are we going back through Prussia?” Sebastien asks one morning, when Nicolò is trying to restart the fire. A weaker part of the roof gave way overnight, which means an actual leak, which means their fire is dead and their kindling is wet and the hut is very cold, but Nicolò seems unfazed by it all. Sebastien has wisely decided to remain under the blanket.

“Austria,” Nicolò says, intent on the tiny flame he has managed to coax to life. “We could go to Trieste.”

“Why Trieste?”

“I liked it, the last time we were there,” Nicolò says. Sebastien is not sure who the ‘we’ are in that sentence. “It’s beautiful.”

“Alright,” Sebastien says.

#

Trieste _is_ beautiful, even in December. The inn Nicolò remembers from his last time does not exist any more, so they end up renting a couple of rooms from an incurious widow. The house is on a narrow street and the only thing that can be seen from the windows is the next building. Sebastien is not sure whether this is a welcome break from Nicolò’s tendency towards houses overlooking the sea or simply a less than picturesque view.

After Poland, neither of them feels much like a mission yet. They take long aimless walks on most days. Nicolò remembers a fair amount of landmarks he’d like to revisit, but other than the large and obvious they’re surprisingly hard to find.

“It might be easier if you remembered addresses,” Sebastien teases.

“Street names change,” Nicolò retorts, but there’s the ghost-smile around his eyes. “I know the café was between the cathedral and the sea.”

“This does _not_ narrow it down much.”

“Perhaps. We’re not in a hurry.”

They never find the café, but Nicolò is right: they aren’t in a hurry. André and Quỳnh are still in Brazil and apparently half in love with it. This part of the world is currently peaceful. There is nothing to do but to rest.

The year turns. So does the weather, from gray and rainy to clear and brightly cold. Long walks are a less enticing prospect in the northerly wind, but staying indoors with books is an acceptable alternative. Something about the weather disquiets Nicolò, however.

One early morning Sebastien wakes to find Nicolò sitting on the edge of the bed. He’s facing away from Sebastien. It does nothing to hide the slump of his shoulders.

“What is it?” Sebastien asks, still half-asleep.

“I thought I had forgotten,” Nicolò says quietly, “and I have not.” He turns towards Sebastien, hesitates, then asks: “Do you remember that morning two years ago?”

“Yes,” Sebastien answers as quietly.

“You asked me to come to you if...” he trails off. “If I started thinking about –“

“Do you?” Sebastien asks, now fully awake.

Nicolò nods, once, tightly.

“Come here,” Sebastien says, and lifts the blanket a little. Nicolò complies and clings to him with the same drowning desperation Sebastien remembers from the last time. His hands and feet are icy. Sebastien wonders how long he sat there on the edge of the bed before Sebastien woke. He presses his lips to the crown of Nicolò’s head. Nicolò flinches.

“I should _not_ ask you to do this,” he says in a strangled whisper. “You are not a bottle of laudanum that I can take when I think I need it.”

Apparently their minds have independently arrived at the same comparisons. “What if I want you to take me?” Sebastien says. “Do I get a say?”

Nicolò huffs, a substitute for a laugh, his breath hot against Sebastien’s collarbones. “Perhaps.” He hesitates, then continues. “But you’ve been martyring yourself for my sake since the day we met. You could be in Brazil, not here. You choke on your dreams, first to protect my sensibilities and then to help me. You’ve... never had an assignation, as far as I can tell, but then I asked you to my bed and you came.”

“All of it was freely given.”

Nicolò inhales. For a brief moment Sebastien wonders whether Nicolò will ask the terrible question, _why?_ and Sebastien will have to lie outright or confess, neither of which he’d rather. But Nicolò holds his breath and says nothing.

It is almost impossible to be physically closer than this, and yet the silence is not a gulf between them but rather an entire sea, a lightless expanse of cold water. Sebastien wants to venture across, and also does not. There’s a difference between being certain he’s in unrequited love and actually hearing it from Nicolò.

“What happened?” Sebastien finally asks.

“I remembered the last time we were here, he and I. There was a week’s worth of northerlies back then, too, so we stayed inside.” His breath catches. “I miss him.”

“I know.”

Sebastien kisses Nicolò’s hair again. Nicolò sighs and does not flinch.

The sex is different from the last time. Sebastien has had two years to consider this possibility, to nurse the memory of their last night, and this time he knows too well what exactly he is trying to exorcise. It’s early morning, too, gray light trickling into the room, and that means he can see all of Nicolò’s reactions.

He really would like to be taken, if that’s the correct word, but Nicolò did not rise to the bait and that must rule it out as a possibility. So Sebastien presses Nicolò into the mattress, teases until Nicolò is swearing in a dialect of Italian Sebastien has never learned, kisses and licks and relishes in the way Nicolò’s hips jerk off the mattress when Sebastien is not holding them down.

Nicolò comes with Sebastien’s name in his mouth and Sebastien is so close that he barely needs to touch himself. He catches his breath, crawls up the bed. Smiles at the look in Nicolò’s eyes.

“You,” Nicolò says, half-accusing, half in wonderment.

“Indeed,” Sebastien says and lies down, burrowing an arm under Nicolò’s neck as an unsubtle invitation. Nicolò takes it, rests his head on Sebastien’s shoulder and one hand over Sebastien’s heart.

It might be a reasonable hour of the morning by now. But the bed is warm and Nicolò calm in Sebastien’s arms, and so Sebastien falls asleep anyway.

#

Sebastien dreams.

He’s swimming in a storm-gray expanse of water, with no land anywhere in sight. The water is desperately cold. The sun is nothing but a paler spot low in the heavy clouds. He’s trying to keep the sun to his left, but he can’t feel his hands or feet any more, so he turns onto his back and floats, expecting to die by freezing. It does not matter. His corpse will float long enough.

He wakes. Sits up, dislodging Nicolò, curls around himself, claws at his chest (beating, his heart is still beating, not slipping towards death) and then at his throat where something is trying to escape, a sob or a prayer or something else. There’s water on his face.

“Sebastien?” Nicolò says, and then repeats it with more alarm. His hand between Sebastien’s shoulder blades is the last warm thing in the world. Sebastien does not deserve it.

Why now? Why _not a day earlier_?

“He swam up,” Sebastien says.

“Oh,” Nicolò says, the breathless unsound a person makes when stabbed between the ribs. He does not meet Sebastien’s eyes. Sebastien wonders if they’ve arrived at the same desperate conclusion: why now and not a day earlier, when Nicolò was not yet so deep in despair as to fuck Sebastien again.

 _Please_ , Sebastien wants to say.

Nicolò’s voice is steady and inevitable like the tide when he asks: “Where is he? What did you dream?”

#

They go back to Scotland, since Yusuf is swimming west, not south. It’s the second worst travel of Sebastien’s life. Nicolò is intent on moving as fast as inhumanly possible, in January, through a not inconsiderable stretch of Europe, and that means more soreness, more cold and more irritated locals than Sebastien has seen in several decades.

Their only conversation is the purely pragmatic: can you forge a letter so we could switch horses here, we will have to stop at the next village, is he still on open sea. They sleep in the same bed more often than not, usually too tired to even say goodnight to each other, and Sebastien only has two or three nights of miserable insomnia where he lies awake and looks at the back of Nicolò’s neck until it’s early enough to shake him awake and start moving again. None of this is surprising, exactly. Nicolò has never been talkative and Sebastien would probably keep the same pace in his stead. And yet, the silence has a certain accusatory undertone.

Sebastien does not know whether that last is true. It might be a phantasm he’s conjured because he is sick with guilt – he’s always known Yusuf was going to swim out, he’s not monstrous enough to want someone to drown for eternity, so _why_ did he have to seduce Nicolò? Not that it matters. Not asking Nicolò questions because Sebastien is afraid of the answer is a habit by now.

All their haste is of no importance in the end, since Yusuf has not reached land by the time they make it to Scotland. Sebastien keeps dreaming of the sea, icy and utterly empty.

“Do you think,” he says, once, with all the bravery he can muster, “that he might be in the Atlantic?”

“No,” Nicolò says, certain like the winter, blunt like a pommel to the face.

Sebastien wonders how much of that certainty is only a desperate hope. The North Sea is vast, but the Atlantic would be worse. A person could voyage hundreds of miles and not see anyone. An immortal might swim across it, but it would be hell even for one of them, alone, without a compass, in winter. Nicolò might have blotted that possibility out of his mind.

Or Yusuf might be slowed by the short cloudy winter days and sea currents and Sebastien is afraid of the hypothetical, nothing else. He doesn’t know.

Sebastien and Nicolò go to Aberdeen. They can’t do anything but wait until Yusuf happens upon some landmark and they’re more anonymous here than they would be in Peterhead or some other old haunt of Nicolò’s.

They still don’t speak. Nicolò sits in their rented room with his nautical charts and waits, his silence uncompanionable and brittle. Sebastien cannot stand it for more than a few hours at a time, and so he goes on long walks. The weather is dismal. He passes a church every once in a while in his rounds, but whatever else he is, a Protestant he is not, and so he usually ends up haunting some or other barren park.

In the evening he goes back to their room. Sometimes they go out to an inn. Sometimes one or other has bought a loaf of bread and a chunk of cheese. They eat. They go to miserable too-shallow sleep. In the morning Nicolò will look at him, the only time there is something like life in his stone angel’s face, and Sebastien will shake his head – no change – and everything will start from the beginning, as if they’re pacing through the same gray day.

In late February there is a change.

“He’s reached land,” Sebastien says when he wakes, before Nicolò has even had time to ask.

Nicolò turns to him and smiles. It’s like sunlight in the middle of winter, his eyes like the sea near Trieste and for a moment Sebastien is as lost as he’s ever been. Then Nicolò says: “Tell me.”

“It’s a small island. Rocky. So tiny he can easily walk around it. There are no people and no buildings.”

It both is and isn’t an improvement. Yusuf does not drown any more, but the islet is entirely empty and thus not much of a shelter. There must be hundreds of such islands off Scotland’s coast. The fact that there is another, higher island visible in the distance when the weather is right narrows it down, but not by much.

Yusuf has hit the limit of his endurance. He tries to make himself wade back into the sea and swim to the other island, and he fails. Nicolò relays that fact with as much tact as he can manage. Nicolò still stops sleeping.

Four days later, exhausted and pale, he says: “We should start with the Orkneys.”

#

They go north again, to Caithness where there is no more north without walking into the sea. Nicolò hires a series of captains to get them from Dunnet at the land’s end to South Ronaldsay, then to an island confusingly named Mainland, then to yet smaller Stronsay. On that last one he pays a local for the privilege of using his boat and they row to an islet called Auskerry.

It’s a lightly overcast day with little wind, the sun bright through the veil of clouds. This merciful weather is probably the only reason the man on Stronsay let them borrow his boat. Sebastien has still never rowed this distance before, least of all in mostly-open sea. But there is a light in Nicolò’s eyes and so Sebastien rows and does not complain.

Auskerry is flat and small and lonely. It may easily be the island from Sebastien’s dreams. They drag the boat ashore, gravel grinding underfoot. A shadow grips Sebastien’s heart. He doesn’t know what he fears more: that this is it, or that it isn’t, and they’re going to have to look for the next uninhabited island.

They walk toward the heart of the island. Then Nicolò exclaims, starts running, crashes into a person who looks like he’s been through hell and then shipwrecked, and thus cannot be anyone but Yusuf.

Sebastien stops, lowers his eyes. This reunion does not feel like something he should observe. He can hear them talking, in a language he has never learned, that may not be even spoken by anyone than those two. He doesn’t have to understand the words to hear the affection.

Then there’s a wild joyful sound he has never heard before. He cannot but look.

Nicolò is laughing. Sebastien has only ever seen his ghost-smiles and this is utterly unlike those, bright and loud, heedless of who is watching. Yusuf is smiling, too, the smirk of someone who has just told a joke he knows to be well-received, but Sebastien cannot look away from Nicolò’s laughter, unfamiliar and wondrous. But he must. It really isn’t his.

He turns away. His heart _hurts_.

**Author's Note:**

> More detailed warnings: canon-typical references to drowning, canon-typical alcoholism, canon-typical self-harm by immortals, the inherent horror of the sea being very large and very likely to kill you. Grief. Infidelity. Obsession tbh.  
>  **Heavy content advisory about suicide** : technically there is none on-screen, but there’s suicidal ideation, discussions of actively suicidal behaviour by an immortal and an ambiguous attempt by an immortal - and no one has 100% healthy attitudes about all that.


End file.
